Bathroom: Behind the Scenes

As an entirely different project for our design team, we’re excited to launch our new Bathroom range. This innovative collection of bathroom accessories features a range of storage, cleaning and waste products to help keep the bathroom clean and tidy.

This movement from the kitchen to the bathroom is a natural progression for us, letting us carry our design expertise and innovative ideas from one room of the home to the next and creating products that are a pleasure to use.

Individually each product in the bathroom collection has its own unique features, but together they make an impressive and stylish range that is sure to revolutionise the most-used room in the house!

Background

We’re innovators at heart and after developing an extensive range of successful kitchenware over the years, it was time to apply our problem-solving approach to other parts of the home.

We quickly found that the bathroom category was an area with very little in the way of innovation. Products were, by and large, the same across the board, so we saw this as an opportunity to disrupt things with a range of effective and beautifully designed solutions. And so we began research into this new category.

The Idea

Our research showed us quite quickly that the most common problem areas in the bathroom were:

Storage & organisation

Cleaning & hygiene

Waste & recycling

With this in mind we set about creating a range of products that would provide some truly innovative solutions to these challenges.

Case Study: Flex™ Toilet Brush

One of the first products we looked at was the toilet brush and we soon realised just how many existing problems there were with current models, including:

Hard to reach all areas

Drips between cleaning and storing

Clogs easily and hard to clean

Bristles distort over time

To address these issues we began by using a ‘trial and error’ method to uncover what would do the task better and more hygienically. The evolution of Flex™ came about through a lot of iterations over its two-year development, as you can see highlighted in the image below.

We found that fine-tuning the bristles was key to solving the clogging, dripping and warping issues, so we looked at completely changing their design, material and arrangement. The wider spacing of the bristles meant that dirt rinsed off easily and it also meant that the brush would dry quicker and therefore drip less.

Flexibility was also key to ensure that the brush could get to all those hard-to-reach areas, like under the rim and into the u-bend. Creating a D-shaped, flexible head meant, as well as fitting into the u-bend, we could add bristles to the top edge which made cleaning under the rim much easier.

Testing

Next came the interesting part…testing. We used a range of methods throughout the development with the various design iterations.

Of course, we had to simulate the conditions our design would encounter so our technical team opted for a mixture of marmite and onion chutney as substitutes in our test toilets, to see how the brushes performed getting rid of the dirt.

We also carried out extensive chemical testing to ensure the material wouldn’t react with common cleaning products.

And finally, our design team took the toilet brushes home to test them out in real-life scenarios.

The final product is quite simply a revolution in toilet brush design and not only looks completely different to standard brushes, but performs better too. After two years and a collaborative effort within the various Joseph Joseph teams, we have a truly innovative product and range that we are extremely proud of.